In a landmark achievement, eSanjeevani, Health Ministry’s national telemedicine initiative today completed 9 lakh consultations. The top most States with highest consultations through eSanjeevani and eSanjeevani OPD platforms are Tamil Nadu (2,90,770) and Uttar Pradesh (2,44,211).
Telemedicine is a new modality for remote diagnosis and treatment of patients over internet, was rolled out on 13th of April 2020 during the first lockdown in the country. eSanjeevani enables virtual meetings between the patients and doctors & specialists from geographically dispersed locations, through video conferencing that occurs in real time. Ministry of Health & Family Welfare has launched two variants of eSanjeevani namely – doctor to doctor (eSanjeevani AB-HWC) in hub and spoke model and patient to doctor (eSanjeevaniOPD). It has been one year now that eSanjeevani Ayushman Bharat-HWC was rolled out.
Andhra Pradesh was the first State to roll out eSanjeevaniAB-HWC services in November 2019 and since then around 240 hubs and over 5000 spokes have been set up by various States. eSanjeevani AB-HWC has completed over 1,83,000 consultations. So far, over 7,16,000 consultations have been recorded on eSanjeevaniOPD that is hosting over 240 online OPDs which include general OPDs and speciality OPDs. The Health Ministry is in regular touch with States to formulate strategies for extending the reach of eSanjeevani services to the underprivileged section of the society too. Few States like Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat etc., are experimenting various models to provision eSanjeevani services for non-IT savvy as well as poor patients who do not have access to the Internet.
